The G5 as it matures...

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
What is the expected top range that Apple and IBM will push the 970 (with die shrinks)? How long til we move to the 980 chip, will it still be a G5? How will it fare against the scaling and chip development of the Intel and AMD chips? What happens if IBM starts selling 970 and 980 PPC chips to other companies for a Windows Box? Is that feasible?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    cubedudecubedude Posts: 1,556member
    Windows doesn't run on PowerPC.
  • Reply 2 of 7
    Why won't it? I thought at one point there was a version of NT running on a PowerPC mac.
  • Reply 3 of 7
    cubedudecubedude Posts: 1,556member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by LiquidR

    Why won't it? I thought at one point there was a version of NT running on a PowerPC mac.



    True, but what are the chance of Microsoft porting Windows to PPC?
  • Reply 4 of 7
    The same chances that a great number of PC makers will switch from Intel architecture to PPC. Anyways, that was just a hypothetical of my grand question of where the 970 and the G5 will take Mac users.
  • Reply 5 of 7
    amorphamorph Posts: 7,112member
    There was a port of Windows NT to PowerPC that was aborted, all the way back when NT was "a better UNIX" that would be able to run Windows 3.1 and MacOS and UNIX as shells on top of an advanced kernel ( ). If it was even half as bad as the port of NT to Alpha then it wasn't worth the time it took to do.



    Importantly, since NT doesn't have anything like NeXT/OS X bundles, NT/PPC customers would have to buy versions of software built specifically for the PPC. If the experience on Alpha is any indication, this didn't work out very well at all.



    Besides, right now MS has its hands full trying to move people over to Itanium. They really can't afford to splinter their development efforts even more than they have.
  • Reply 6 of 7
    Uneducated guesses (origional topic)...



    I'd guess that since the G5 was into'd at 2 gig ... I'd expect it to make a MINimum of 4 gig in the not-too-distant future.



    If the 980 becomes a mac chip ... i'd expect it will still be a G5.



    G5 will be the top architecture (available) for 4 years at least.



    This is simply based on observations of past behavior ... the information is probably worth exactly what you paid for it
  • Reply 7 of 7
    bartobarto Posts: 2,246member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Amorph

    Besides, right now MS has its hands full trying to move people over to Itanium. They really can't afford to splinter their development efforts even more than they have.



    I don't think MS really cares about Itanium. Whatever CPU is out at the time, they will want to support it.



    1) Move developers over to the .NET framework

    2) Get rid of the Win32 foundation (or at least reduce it to a compatibility layer running in a sandbox)

    3) Now MS can really do stuff with Windows (porting, framework level expansion, die MDI die)



    Barto
Sign In or Register to comment.